Letters

Fancy Gadgets

Having followed the "advances" in avionics and flight procedures since receiving my wings in 1958, and having just finished reading your entire March edition, I wonder if we’re not re-inventing the "wheel" and in the process cluttering up the cockpit with multiple and conflicting gadgets and creating a procedural nightmare for the crews.

Let’s take this magical "continuous descent approach." We at The Flying Tiger Line performed that procedure wherever possible 40 years ago and so did other airlines. Let’s take another new magical innovation — RNP. Any sharp pilot could pull that off and did, with a radio range and a beacon. And ADS-B isn’t going to be the magic so many expect it will be, except in remote areas.

It certainly is interesting that many now realize these magic gadgets will need many of the existing ground-based facilities they are replacing as their back-up, creating more cost and confusion.

What all this "innovation" is really saying is that today’s pilots aren’t as sharp as they were decades ago, when you really had to work at being a good pilot. Today’s pilots have largely evolved into systems managers and as we have progressed along this line their airmanship skills have constantly declined if not evaporated. More technical innovations are therefore needed to make up for lost skills that will eventually end up with more confusion in the cockpit and marginalization of safety.

Somebody had better step back and say "hold it" before we end up creating costly navigation and safety nightmares. The recent BA 777 crash is a good example of a lack of airmanship mentality. It obviously never occurred to the crew to make sure they had sufficient altitude to make the runway should they lose power. In the "old days" that would have been in the forefront of every pilot’s mind while preparing to land.

The problem is that we are becoming too sophisticated to be safe. If one looks at accident statistics, it is primarily engine technology that has brought aviation to the current level of safety — not piloting or innovations in navaids. We still take off on closed runways, hit each other on the ramp, have mid-airs, hit short and fly into mountains despite all those fancy gadgets and video games.

Karl Kettler Flemington, N.J.

Turbulence Technology

In reading your article on the currently in-work and available turbulence technologies (Avionics, February 2008, p. 36), upon reaching the "Other Approaches" section, I was surprised to see no mention of TAMDAR.

TAMDAR (Tropospheric Airborne Meteorological Data Reporting) is a technology that was invented, developed, refined and put into production by AirDat LLC, with support from NASA. While the primary focus of the technology is improved weather prediction, the benefits to be gained by airlines should not be overlooked, especially in the area of turbulence.

Currently installed on nearly 100 airliners flying throughout North America, TAMDAR actively provides viable and useful turbulence information every day, with the growth potential to significantly reduce injuries and structural damage to aircraft via proper integration and use by various airlines.

Within the TAMDAR technology is a turbulence algorithm that minimizes variables and bypasses many of the reliability issues inherent to the interpretation of turbulence severity. It does not rely on a PIREP program that requires the pilot to report severe turbulence during the most critical phases of flight. It is not limited to installation on certain airframe types. It is a turbulence technology that, although still in its infancy, provides standardized turbulence values on a numerical scale that remains consistent regardless of the size or performance characteristics of the aircraft on which it is installed and regardless of the type of aircraft for which the information is intended. The outputs are completely airframe independent.

In short, the TAMDAR system provides objective and automated turbulence reports at specific and consistent time intervals throughout all phases of flight via a system that can be installed on any airframe without inducing variations in the scaling of the output data.

Jeffrey E. Rex Littleton, Colo.